Mark Mills - Amagansett

She set the table while he cooked. She remarked on the beauty of the sideboard, and he told her that it was made from the wood of one of the tall elms on Amagansett Main Street felled by the ‘38 hurricane. He explained that the house too was a victim of that apocalyptic storm. It had started life in East Hampton, on the western shore of Georgica Pond, put up as a summer home by a New York publisher at the turn of the century. Shattered by the high winds, it had lain derelict throughout the war before Conrad bought it, transporting it along the beach on skids to the plot of land he’d just purchased on Napeague. A section of the roof, the back bedroom and one corner of the main room were all missing, and all were replaced with lumber and shingles recovered from the old Amagansett Gun Club, sold off by the members when they decided to upgrade their bunking quarters out on Montauk.

The barn had arrived a few months later, dismantled in Amagansett then re-erected, piecemeal, beside the house. After more than two hundred and fifty years of service, the Van Duyns no longer had need of it. Ten generations of the family had stored their hay in the barn, and many more generations of cows had brushed against its sturdy uprights, rounding them off, buffing them smooth as glass.

As for the whaleboat house, the third side of the open yard formed by the buildings, that had been Rollo’s contribution to their joint enterprise. For as long as anyone could remember it had stood, sleek and low, just back from the beach at the end of Atlantic Avenue. If Conrad had offered to take Rollo on simply as a member of his crew, it would still be standing there. But he hadn’t; he had proposed that they go into business together—a true partnership, equal shares, riding out the highs and the lows together, the good years and the bad.

After Ned Kemp had overcome his initial reservations and consented to the venture, he insisted that Rollo bring something to the table. Conrad was, after all, providing the dory, the cat-boat, and a whole bunch of other gear. Rollo had never wanted for anything, but nor had he ever received payment for his labors. He was housed, clothed, fed and cared for, and in return he did what was asked of him—working the farm, crewing on the Ariadne during the bunker season, dragging for yellowtail flounder in fall, codfishing off the ocean beach in winter. There was no injustice in this, it made sense to everyone, not least of all Rollo, and it worked. Or rather, it had up until then.

When Conrad refused to accept a cash payment from Captain Ned, Rollo chipped in his only asset, his inheritance, gifted him ahead of time by his father. It was never in doubt that Rollo, of all the brothers, would be the one to inherit the whaleboat house. Since childhood he had been drawn to the building and its mysterious contents, dusty and disused, his fascination fueled by the thrilling tales of derring-do learned at the knee of his grandfather, Cap’n Josh.

By the age of ten Rollo had become the official repository of all matters relating to the Kemps’ long association with inshore whaling off the East End. He was a storehouse of anecdotes, too young to detect the whiff of embellishment clinging to them. Had a right whale, a notoriously sluggish creature, really dragged six men in a twenty-eight-foot boat two miles out beyond the bar in as many minutes?

Rollo knew of every rally made by the Kemps off the ocean beach. He knew who had first sighted the whale, who had raised the weft above their house on Bluff Road, and who had crewed for them. He could tell you the sea and weather conditions at the time, as well as the exact course taken by each whale after it was fastened on to. And he could describe in detail the nature of each kill, clean or messy, depending on the accuracy of the man administering the coup de grâce with the lance, and the ferocity of the exhausted animal’s death flurry.

His accounts only became sketchy when it came to the contribution made by the other crews who had participated in the rallies. Inshore whaling was, necessarily, a collective affair. How else to tow sixty tons of dead whale ten miles back to shore in a heaving sea? Rollo wasn’t to blame for the omissions in the stories he told. He was only repeating his grandfather’s words, and Cap’n Josh had never been renowned for the high regard in which he held rival whalemen. At best he had a grudging respect for the Van Duyns who worked the other end of the village. This diminished by degrees the further west one headed. The East Hampton crews were barely worthy of consideration or comment, and as for the ‘Wainscott dumplings’, as he called them, well, they were fit only for ridicule, putting to sea in those clumsy, oversized dories of theirs.

It was all bluster, of course. Any man who has thrust iron into a creature a thousand times his own size is inextricably bound to others who have done the same.

Conrad and Billy were eleven years old when Rollo first shared with them the secrets of the whaleboat house. It was a Friday, after school, a sunny, windblown afternoon, with choppy waves thumping against a stunt beach, and they’d had to clear the sand banked up against the doors before they could enter.

The whaleboat held center stage, like a dusty sarcophagus in some ancient tomb. Around it lay an armory of weapons to ensnare a boy’s imagination—harpoons, lances, axes, grapnels, and blades of every description for cutting into blubber. But Rollo directed their attention to the boat itself. He made them trace the sheer lines of its white pine hull with their fingertips. He pointed out the sharp stern end, explaining that the ability to retreat rapidly without turning was vital during the whale’s flurry, when a crashing blow from the vast flukes could tear the boat and its occupants apart. He showed them the wooden tholepins trimmed with leather to deaden the sound of the oars, of approaching doom; and he demonstrated how, in time-honored tradition, the boat-steerer switched places with the boat-header in order to deliver the death-stroke.

Most impressive, though, was the change in Rollo. What had happened to the nervous, downturned gaze, the halting speech, the struggle to put names to all but the most commonplace objects? He spoke with a confidence he had never once displayed in the classroom, plucking technical terms from the air at will.

Conrad and Billy must have passed the test, for they were invited to return time and time again. Together they re-enacted the stories handed down by Cap’n Josh to his grandson, Rollo standing tall and proud in the stern, barking orders to his depleted crew of two—‘Slack back!’…‘Hold water!’…‘Spring ahead!’…‘Stern all!’—before hurling the harpoon into a big burlap sack of hay conscripted to play the whale. With time, willing crew members were found to man the other oars. Then numbers climbed beyond the capacity of the boat, and tales of inshore rallies made way for grander, more epic yarns of deep-sea, round-the-horn whaling that could accommodate a larger cast of characters.

There was never any shortage of adventures to be played out. As a young man, Cap’n Josh had sailed from Sag Harbor on the ocean-going whaleships, the last of three generations of Kemps to do so. He had made three trips in all, visiting both frosty ends of the globe, rising through the ranks from pimpled greenhorn to chief harpooner. When gas lighting finally put paid to the demand for whale blubber, he returned to the wife and young family he hardly knew, a respected man, and a rich one.

Like others in Amagansett and East Hampton fortunate enough to have survived their time aboard the whaleships, he’d had to content himself with sporadic rallies off the ocean beach in late winter. After the speedy finbacks and hostile sperm whales of the southern oceans, the local right whales—long on blubber and bone, short on speed—made for easy quarry. Then suddenly, some years before the Great War, the whales disappeared. Inshore whalemen up and down the coast hung up their harpoons. All the gear was stowed away, forgotten.

The Kemps’ boat hadn’t seen the light of day for almost twenty years when Rollo, Conrad, Billy and the pack of other local kids first heaved it out of the whaleboat house under the approving gaze of Cap’n Josh. The building itself was to double as a whaleship, its boxy construction not unlike the square-sterned, blunt-bowed vessels that used to clog the quayside in Sag Harbor—‘Built by the mile and cut off in lengths as you want ‘em,’ Cap’n Josh had said, before dispatching two men into the mastheads to keep watch for whales.

‘Ah blow-O!’ they hollered from the roof.

‘Where away?’

‘Sperm whale, two points off the weather bow, sir, four miles away.’

‘Stand by to lower.’

And so it continued, Cap’n Josh marshaling his troupe of young actors, feeding them their lines, directing the chase of a particularly feisty sperm whale encountered in the South Pacific, which, once ironed, had proceeded to strip all three hundred fathoms of manila line out of the boat before dragging it on a heart-stopping Nantucket sleigh ride (Cap’n Josh rocking the boat fiercely to mimic the effect of it crashing over the waves). The whale had fought till the last, capsizing the boat on two occasions before finally expiring.

That wasn’t the end of it, though. They had lost sight of the whaleship on the long pull back. Then the wind breezed up from the sou’west. They were six men in a cockleshell boat tossed on an angry sea, many hundreds of miles from land, rowing blind in a fading light, dragging a dead whale. When the last vestiges of day dipped below the western horizon, hope went with them. Some among them began to pray, not for succor, but final prayers, beseeching forgiveness for sins committed.

And then they saw it, a beacon in the night—the distant fires of the try-works burning on the deck of their mother ship—and the strength returned to their backs and arms. Safe alongside at last, one of the oarsmen, a Scotsman, cursed then kicked the whale that had almost cost them their lives. Too exhausted for further labor, others were assigned to undertake the cutting-in while they recovered on the deck, smoking their pipes. When the first blanket piece was hoisted aboard from the carcass, the block made fast to the main masthead came free, and two tons of suspended blubber felt the fierce grip of gravity.

The scene was enacted in somber silence, the whaleboat’s lugsail doubling as the blanket piece, Billy playing the unfortunate Scotsman on whom it landed. The message was clear, though Cap’n Josh spelled it out for the younger ears. Even in death the whale had sought satisfaction for the disrespect shown it by one of its hunters. It was a lesson they would all be wise to remember.

These expeditions to far-flung corners of the globe were played out almost every weekend for a year. Then Cap’n Josh suffered a seizure, and after a brief, humiliating struggle turned up his toes. That he died well after his time was poor consolation to Rollo, who withdrew into himself. The whaleboat house fell dormant once more, until given new life on Napeague almost twenty years later, taking its place between Conrad’s house and the barn. It was pleasing to Conrad that all three buildings had experienced previous lives. It somehow made them one with the landscape, the ever-changing sands on which they were perched.

None of this he had any intention of revealing to Lillian, but she drew it from him in the way that only a stranger can, fueling him with questions. At a certain point, though, she grew silent, pensive.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘The stories.’

‘What about them?’

‘I don’t have any to tell. Nothing that comes close, at least.’

‘I doubt that’s true.’

‘It is. But it doesn’t matter.’

‘They’re just stories,’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe I made them up.’

‘Now you’re just trying to make me feel better.’

‘If I am, it’s not working.’

His words brought a smile to her lips. She lit a cigarette and looked at him intently.

‘What are you doing here, Conrad?’

‘What?’

‘Why not over there with everyone else? Why out here on your own?’

‘It’s my home.’

‘You made it your home.’

He felt himself coming to, like waking from a dream, the cold wash of reality bringing him to his senses, suddenly aware of the shattered lobsters on their plates.

‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘I should drive you back.’

She asked if she could borrow a book and he told her to take her pick.

‘Is this any good?’ she asked, plucking one off the shelf.

‘Not bad.’

She turned to him. ‘I thought you hadn’t read them.’

‘That one I’ve read.’

‘I hear it’s tough going, but worth it.’

He didn’t take the bait, but he did reach for a pen and write in the fly-leaf: To Lillian, on her…

‘How old are you?’

‘Never ask a lady her age,’ she said, but told him anyway.

…28th birthday, he wrote.

‘Aren’t you going to say who it’s from?’

‘You’ll know,’ said Conrad.

They barely spoke on the drive back.

‘Thanks for the book,’ she said as they pulled up in front of her house.

She reached for the handle, but hesitated. Turning back, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

‘That’s the best birthday I’ve had in years.’

And the last she would ever have.

Sunday was a better day.

He rose early, venturing outdoors for the first time in two days. There was an ominous ground swell running, with waves breaking over the bar and banking up in their eagerness to strike the shore, the outer ripples of some distant Caribbean storm.

He stripped off and fought his way through the break, struggling against the pain in his ribs. It had diminished little in the past week, though the bruising had lost some of its lividity, dulling to a grayish purple tinged with yellow. He still welcomed the injury inflicted by Ellis Hulse’s boot. It had offered him the perfect excuse to lay off the fishing for a while, to be alone, no need to keep up appearances of normality.

That changed a few hours later, when Rollo showed up fresh from church in his ill-fitting suit and clutching a Bible. He had brought some aspirins with him to speed along Conrad’s recovery.

Rollo had spent the past week crewing for his father on the Ariadne, a 110-foot subchaser from the Great War, the fastest rig in the Smith Meal bunker fleet. The fishing had been good—Conrad had seen pods of menhaden darkening the waters off the back side all week—but Rollo seemed unwilling to talk about it. This meant only one thing: a spell on the ocean in the company of his father and brothers had undermined his confidence.

No doubt they’d had him working the winch, or below decks in the engine room manning the old Fairbanks-Morse, awaiting instructions from the pilothouse. Nothing too challenging. Never anything too challenging.

Conrad announced that he’d be ready for action by Wednesday, and Rollo visibly came to life, rolling a smoke and demanding a coffee.

‘We’ll be into them Wednesday, get us a bunch, you’ll see,’ he said when he finally left, taking off towards the beach.

Conrad watched him all the way.

Rollo turned as he crested the frontal dune, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Looks fishy to me!’ he yelled.